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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Designing for Print vs. Online

Audiences read printed materials and online websites differently. According to Nielsen (1997), people do not read word by word on web pages, but they scan. Nielsen (2006) also added that people read web content in an F-shaped pattern - where F stands for Fast.

Heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of three websites. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations. [Nielsen, 2006]

Hence, designing and writing for print and online are different. On websites, the first two paragraphs must state the most important information (Nielsen, 2006). In other words, inverted pyramid format is used. Radshaw (2003) opined that web content should have 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent. Print has a huge canvas that designers can play with, so word limit is not important (Nielsen, 1999).

Websites should contain more subheads and bullet points if compared to prints. Besides, web design should be simple, clear, consistent, appropriate, appealing and usable.